McFarland: Petraeus-Ailes report 'silly'

12/5/12 5:05 PM EST

K.T. McFarland, the Fox News analyst, says that Bob Woodward was "off base" to suggest that her boss Roger Ailes was serious about trying to enlist Gen. David Petraeus to run for president.

"I know now that Roger was joking, but at the time, I wasn’t sure," McFarland writes in a column for FoxNews.com. Woodward "was way off base to characterize it as a serious attempt to get him to run, or to give him political advice."

Earlier this week, Woodward reported that Ailes used McFarland to advise Gen. Petraues to run for president unless President Obama offered him the top military position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An audio recording of that conversation also shows McFarland asking Petraeus, per Ailes' request, if there was "anything Fox is doing right or wrong that you want to tell us to do differently."

But McFarland now claims that she and Petraeus "were having fun."

"Having just told me definitively that he wouldn’t run, he suggested that maybe Ailes could run this non-existent campaign. It was not a serious conversation plotting General Petraeus’ political future; it was the kind of idle speculation that happens in every campaign season," McFarland writes. "That’s why they call it the silly season. I knew he was serious about not wanting to run, and he knew I wasn’t serious in pressing it."

Reached for comment regarding the audio tape, Ailes had dismissed the proposal to Petraeus as “more of a joke, a wiseass way I have." Ailes also said McFarland "was way out of line" and even disclosed her salary, noting she was a contributor making less than $75,000 a year.

McFarland is now echoing Ailes' remarks, and sounds equally dismissive of those who took the proposal seriously.

"I realize conspiracy theorists have used this off-the-record interview to claim it was some plot to put Petraeus in the Oval Office," she continues. "But it was little more than one defense analyst (me) trading some political gossip and laughs with one of the country’s most important military leaders (Petraeus)."